Warrior is a film which should have never worked. It had all the cliche elements – a recovering alcoholic father, a brotherly feud, and a fight with a cash prize to solve all financial problems – wound up with the underdog theme of the Rocky film series.

But it did, beautifully.

I never got to see the film when it was released in theaters. When I finally saw it on DVD, I was disappointed I hadn’t, because Warrior does what few films in recent memory have achieved; it trends highly familiar ground in the sports genre, but breaks all the cinematic “rules” in the process elevates itself above the slough of predictable sports films.

The film begins with Paddy Conlon (Nick Nolte) a recovering alcoholic and recently converted Christian, attempting to reinsert himself into the lives of his two sons, Tommy (Tom Hardy) a United States Marine, and Brenden (Joel Edgerton) a high school physics teacher.

Meanwhile, both brothers are estranged from each other as well due to the circumstances involving their family’s separation. Both become involved in mixed-martial arts fighting, Tommy after he knocks out a professional fighter and the video goes viral online, and Brenden in a desperate attempt to pay back his loan to the bank and save his house from foreclosure.

Tommy reluctantly enlists the help of his father to train him for the Sparta tournament, a winner-take-all UFC championship with a $5 million prize, which Brenden also signs up for when he is fired from his teaching job.

Ultimately, both brothers advance to the final round, where they fight against each other.

It is evident within the first 20 minutes how Warrior avoided a death by cliches; while it uses previously established themes as the basis for the story, it treats the material in such a way as to leave the audience wondering, rather than anticipating.

For example, there are various scenes of Tommy and Paddy training together, but they are short and unsentimental. The film makes it clear this isn’t Rocky and his beloved trainer, Mickey. The lack of dialogue in their scenes conveys the intense resentment Tommy has towards his father for what he did – things which are never fully explained in the film, because their expressions really are worth a thousand words.

I also appreciated that the film didn’t pretend that just because their surname is Irish they are required to go to Irish pubs, have an Irish flag in their home and speak like they’re shepherds from the Wicklow Mountains (Boondock Saints 2, anyone?)

Director Gavin O’Connor does a commendable job of handling the religious material in probably the best manner I’ve seen since 2006’s Amazing Grace, albeit Christianity played a much bigger role in that movie. Paddy’s journey is one of internal conflict, and because of this he doesn’t preach to his sons – and indirectly the audience.

The strongest aspect of the story is the relationship between the brothers. Much like Dicky Eklund and Micky Ward in The Fighter, Tommy and Brenden struggle to come to terms with the different decisions they made in the past, which have had a deep impact on their lives in the present and directly led to their separation.

In The Fighter, however, Christian Bale and Mark Wahlberg are hardly seen onscreen without the other. In Warrior, the two brothers share only one scene together, and they don’t have much to say.

Nevertheless, what little they do say tells us everything we need to know in order to comprehend the situation. We don’t have it delivered to us on a platter or shoved into our face.

The film is also spared from a hackneyed tone due to the overall performances of the cast. Nolte’s Paddy is realistic, believable, and human. Even though he’s found God, he’s not a plastic saint.

Despite his relatively smaller frame compared to his opponents, Edgerton accomplishes the difficult task of persuading us that Brenden is capable of defeating men twice his size through superior fighting technique and motivation.

Tom Hardy, however, manages to go a full step further and make us look at Tommy as a real person, rather than a character. Having first seen him in Band of Brothers as a lanky, thin paratrooper, the decade-long transition makes him look almost unrecognizable, aided in no small part by the intense anger which practically emanates from his whole demeanor.

This is a man you genuinely fear when he looks into the camera with his thousand yard stare, and when he pummels his opponents senseless, you can sense the pain he’s carried inside for years. In doing so, we feel sympathy for him, even when he is merciless and cruel to his repentant father. Rather than judge Tommy, we relate to him and don’t expect forgiveness to come right away.

In fact, Tommy represents the film in many ways.

As a UFC fighter, he ignores all the “rules,” such as giving interviews, attending media conferences and waiting for the referee to pronounce him the winner of his fights when it’s obvious his opponent isn’t getting back up.

Likewise, Warrior discards rules which serve no useful purpose and allows it to have one of the most melodramatic scenes conceivable – a man punching his brother senseless while insisting that he loves him – which succeeds in emotionally moving us rather than make us laugh at its absurdity. Lastly, Warrior breaks one of the biggest rules of storytelling by leaving practically every loose end untied, save for the brother’s reconciliation.

As for which brother wins, I won’t spoil the ending for those who haven’t seen it, but there is a bit of a shock when the credits begin to roll down the screen, and this is where Warrior dodges the final cliche, deus ex machine.

The story simply has too many conflicts for it to bring proper closure without requiring a highly unrealistic solution. Rather than attempt it, the film leaves the audience at the beginning of the end of the story with the assumption that we’re smart enough to figure it out ourselves.

At first, I didn’t quite get it, until I understood what had happened. Cliche films have to tell us everything. They patronize us. Warrior, like Tommy, walks away without explaining itself, and it departs with sangfroid, not uncertainty.